Roger Faligot

Faligot, Roger. "France, Sigint and the Cold War." Intelligence and National Security 16, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 177-208.

Under Alexandre de Marenches in the 1970s, the SDECE absorbed the previously independent Sigint organization, the Radioelectronic Communication Group (GCR). The French also moved closer to the UK-USA pact while avoiding actually joining. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the French have been active in developing new national Sigint capabilities.

[France/Postwar]

Faligot, Roger, and Remi Kauffer. Tr., Christine Donougher. The Chinese Secret Service: Kang Sheng and the Shadow Government in Red China. New York: Morrow, 1989. London: Headline Books, 1990. [pb] Kang Sheng et les services secrets Chinoise. Paris: Editions Robert Lafont, 1987.

Dreyer, IJI&C 4.4, says this book is a "compilation of rumors about the sex lives of the Chinese secret service, the rest of the Chinese leadership, and the foreign community resident in China. While an entertaining work, there is precious little information about the organization and activities of the secret service.... What information is presented becomes suspect because of the large number of errors." There is a "tendency to report rather fanciful stories uncritically." This is "an amusing book, but hardly an enlightening one."

To Richelson, I&NS 9.4, the book is "disappointing." Chambers finds it "useful, but rather tedious reading." Fic, I&NS 6.4, says the work is undermined by poor documentation, with "barely 60 footnotes scattered over 452 pages of prose.... [S]erious students of the subject are likely to be disappointed."

[China/Gen]

Faligot, Roger, and Rémi Kauffer. Histoire mondiale de renseignement. [A World History of Intelligence] 2 vols.

Vol. I: 1870-1939. Paris: Laffont, 1993.

Vol. II: Les maîtres espions: De la guerre froide à nos jours. [The Master Spies: From Cold War to the Present] Paris: Laffont, 1994.

Kahn, I&NS 23.2 (Apr. 2008), says that "this work's howlers ["errors of detail"] destroy much of its usefulness.... Books like this give popularizers a bad name!" Volume II "deals only with spies and says nothing about such important forms of intelligence as satellites and codebreaking."

[Overviews/Gen/00s]

Faligot, Roger, and Pascal Krop. Tr., W.D. Halls. La Piscine: The French Secret Services Since 1944. Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989. La piscine. Les services secrets français 1944-1984. Paris: Seuil Paris, 1984.

Clark comment: The subject here is the French foreign intelligence service, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), previously the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE). Porch, IJI&C 1.2, sees this as "a readable book," but one "rather longer on scandal and personality sketches than on analysis." To Lucas, I&NS 6.1, the book has two faults: One, the authors "say little about the work of intelligence-gathering and analysis"; and two, while they "gather a wealth of information on certain episodes, they have neglected ... others."

[France/Overviews]

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